I read two very interesting posts recently on the demise of blogging, destroyed by social media and click-driven media. ….

“I feel entirely the same way about the blogging golden age. What was precious about it was its simple integrity: A writer gets to explore his craft and develop his own audience. We weren’t in it for the money or the clicks or the followers. We were in it for the core experience shared between a writer and a reader — and the enormous freedom that removing the editorial gatekeepers unlocked. It was a brief period, but an alive one, and it was largely lost — or abandoned — because of a major failure of nerve on the part of most print media….”

“But there’s hope on the horizon again. The sewer of most of Twitter is now so rank that even addicts have begun to realize that they are sinking in oceans of shitholery. Facebook is long overdue for a collapse, and the old institutions are showing signs of developing more character and coherence….”

Social media really is a sewer, and I attribute much of the evaporation of the blogosphere to Twitter. It’s much easier to find an instant audience on Twitter than to build the relationship with readers to get them to come to your website. Twitter pundits are the worst pundits, counting their worth based on “followers” (many of whom are fake and purchased).

I saw this on the 5th February. It seems prescient, with the mob now baying for Facebook’s blood (if on largely spurious grounds).

The centralisation of the web is an evil. It has placed the web in the hands of a tiny handful of people, none of them worthy of our trust. Wikipedia sucked out of the web the joy of research, and replaced it with an official truth decided by trolls and perverts and who knows what. Facebook was always dishonest. Twitter has turned into a platform for censorship.

What started off as a world in which anyone might be heard is now all about deciding who may be allowed to speak. Instead of a place where anybody could start a blog, or a website, on equal terms with everyone else, we have this tiny number of corporations.

Fortunately this too will pass. Let us hope that better days lie ahead.